Sailors help make carrier Bush 'floating cesspool'

November 19, 2011|Tamara Dietrich

It's the flush heard 'round the internet:

A Navy mother blasting the wonky vacuum toilet system aboard the USS George H.W. Bush for chronic breakdowns which leave sailors desperate enough to relieve themselves in bottles, showers, sinks and places I don't even want to know.

"Morale is declining and the health and safety of thousands of deployed military personnel is at stake," Mary Brotherton wrote in a recent blog entry in which she calls the Norfolk-based super-carrier — the most modern ship of its kind — a "floating cesspool."

We all appreciate the importance of a working toilet when you need one, and a mother's protective instinct for her son serving at sea, but there's more here than merely a poorly designed toilet system.

In fact, the Bush's commanding officer is blaming the plumbing problems on a few disgruntled sailors who keep flushing items that have no business being flushed.

Technicians, he says, have had to clear the plumping of things like clothing, hard-boiled eggs, nuts and bolts, towels, eating utensils and mop heads.

"When you do throw a mop head into a toilet and flush it down, you're not just acting out against the ship — you're acting out against every fellow sailor who uses the heads on the ship," Capt. Brian "Lex" Luther told reporter Peter Frost in a shipboard phone interview.

So are the toilets breaking first, and demoralized sailors then flush nonflushables to vent their frustration? Or are demoralized sailors flushing nonflushables to deliberately break the toilets?

Frankly, who cares?

We can argue which came first — the chicken or the (hard-boiled) egg — till we're blue in the face. Bottom line, sailors shouldn't be sabotaging the carrier's toilets, no matter how disgruntled they are.

First, these are grownups, not kids who don't know better.

Second, these are paid professionals, not prison inmates with boundary issues.

And third, the carrier cost us taxpayers $6.2 billion to build, and I, for one, don't want a few disgruntled sailors breaking the darn thing.

Sailors are in the best position to know — or figure out — who the culprits are and convince them to cease and desist. Or, at minimum, report them.

You'd think that maintaining their own workable toilets would be its own incentive.

Then again, the Bush's toilets are hard to keep in working order, and not just because of saboteurs.

The ship has a brand spanking new vacuum system so fragile that one clog can take out every commode in half the ship. A leaking vacuum hose can do the same.

What Einstein engineer would design a waste disposal system for 4,800 people that automatically incapacitates hundreds of commodes if only one malfunctions?

For that matter, who would approve such a design?

Reports are that six times on this deployment, which began in May, all 423 toilets were out at once. When that happens, technicians might have to search 250 miles of pipe to find the problem.

So far, they've spent more than 10,000 man hours to fix busted heads. Most were repaired within 24 hours, and some within minutes. One shipwide outage, however, kept a department working nonstop for 35 hours.

And there's no backup plan for backed-up toilets — no portable johns or sealable "wag bags" to hold waste.

Sailors told Navy Times they've had to search the ship over sometimes for a working toilet. When they can't find one, they may resort to relieving themselves in showers or industrial sinks or on the catwalks.

Sailors are reportedly limiting their intake of food and liquids in hopes of minimizing bathroom breaks, raising the risk of dehydration and urinary tract infections.

If there's a line outside a working toilet, sometimes they set up a triage to figure out who gets to go first.

"We all assess who is going to go in their pants first," a second class petty officer told Navy Times, "and set the lines according to that."